What’s up everyone and welcome to Ben’s Building Blocks! If you’ve never read my content before, welcome. To those that have, welcome back. I truly appreciate everyone that reads and supports during NBA season. This article is designed for me to highlight the top plays of the day. Obviously, things can change rapidly in the NBA with injury news close to lock, so I would be sure to subscribe to our premium package for access to our Final Thoughts cheat sheet, our premium discord channel and my core plays. Our Core Plays product gives you the ability to tail all of our analysts in your contests each night. We do the work for you, and you simply plug and play with our premium Core Plays. With that being said, let’s hop into the plays…
Building Blocks
Jimmy Butler
Butler will be pretty much the highest-owned player tonight in all formats, but will be tough to avoid against the Oklahoma City Thunder. All of Tyler Herro, Bam Adebayo, Kyle Lowry and Caleb Martin will miss tonight for the Miami Heat. He’s already a pretty elite player when it comes to usage rate / fantasy point per minute stuff and now he will literally be doing it all for the Heat. We don’t have a sizable sample-size of the Heat without all these guys, but we know that Butler is going to have the ball in his hands a ton. With the big-three off the floor this season, he sees a usage rate bump to around 28% and we can expect that number to push 30%+ on Tuesday night. You can fade if you want to in tournaments, but he’s the best option in his pricing tier for cash games tonight.
Duane Washington
Washington may get a touch over-shadowed by all the Miami value tonight, but make no mistake, he’s one of the top point per dollar plays on the slate. Washington is exactly the type of cheap player we like to target in DFS — he’s extremely aggressive offensively and has topped 18+ FGA in two straight games. We don’t know the status of Landry Shamet, but we do know that Phoenix will be down all of Chris Paul, Devin Booker and DeAndre Ayton opening up a lot of shot attempts. He actually owns over a 34% usage rate with all those guys off the court — which is simply not indicative of his low price tag. He’s arguably the top play on the slate for cash games when factoring in price.
Value Plays
Orlando Robinson + Miami Heat
This should come as no surprise given the amount of bodies that the Heat are down on Tuesday night. Robinson has huge upside tonight, and I’m interested in him even if he doesn’t end up starting. We saw him post a huge 15-9-4 line off the bench with Bam out after Christmas, and I think he could log close to 30 minutes even if he doesn’t crack the starting lineup. Outside of Robinson, all of Gabe Vincent, Max Strus and Victor Oladipo will be increased roles alongside Jimmy Butler. Plugging in 3+ Heat players will be the go-to move in cash games and single entry formats tonight — with Butler, Vincent and Robinson being my top-three.
OwnersBox Top Play
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Pascal Siakam
On a slate with all this value, most of the star-level players will come in lower-owned because everyone will be a similar build. Siakam is someone that I think could go over-looked on Tuesday night despite how strong his match-up is against the Charlotte Hornets. He paces the Raptors in both usage rate and per minute production this season — while the Hornets have been awful defensively. They’re come in bottom-five in defensive efficiency and the Raptors actually have one of the highest team totals on the board tonight at over 118 points. I think both Siakam and FVV could have big games, but I’ll keep going back to the big-men vs CHA well at low-ownership.
Written by Ben Hossler (Follow @BenHossler on Twitter)
